New Media, Communication, and Society

Reviews / Votes

"We live in an environment characterized by extraordinary complexity, one that includes all manner of new media and digital technologies, mobile devices, wired and wireless connectivity, networks, the Internet and the web, social media, virtual reality and artificial intelligence, ubiquitous computing, cloud storage, data mining, streaming content, multi-screen viewing, information overload, participatory media, and so much more. Learning how to navigate our new media environment is no easy task, but all the more vital for anyone associated with the media professions, indeed for anyone entering the twenty-first century workplace, and ultimately for every one of us, as citizens in a democracy. There has long been a need for a text that provides a clear, accessible, and comprehensive introduction to new media, and at last, thanks to Mary Ann Allison and Cheryl A. Casey, we have one. New Media, Communication, and Society delivers exactly what students and instructors need from an introductory text, and indeed exceeds all expectations of what such a text might provide."-Lance Strate, Fordham University, author of Media Ecology: An Approach to Understanding the Human Condition "Here at last is a textbook with the student's world in mind. Recently I've completed studying a lot of research about how the best teachers teach and the answer always includes 'meeting the students where they are.' Rather than being centered in the 'old media' as so many communication texts are, authors Cheryl A. Casey and Mary Ann Allison place us at the center of the media world of hand-held and digital devices large and especially small which transform learning and every part of society. As a former assistant to Marshall McLuhan, I appreciate how they apply his work to the current decade and as an ethicist, I'm delighted to find a chapter on the 'dark side' of the Internet. But the book is far larger than that-30 chapters. There are so many engaging topics, so much fresh research, and all so readily available to those from 18 to 81. I strongly recommend the thinking of Casey and Allison in the classroom, on the written page, in digital format, and in platforms yet to come."-Tom Cooper, Professor, Emerson College, Boston, Massachusetts "New Media, Communication, and Society by Mary Ann Allison and Cheryl A. Casey is an extremely thoughtful, comprehensive, and accessible resource for students, teachers, general readers, and anyone else engaged in one of the key challenges that we all face: making sense of the contours and consequences of the media environment that we live in. The authors concisely survey a wide range of theoretical, historical, and practical material that is essential to understanding and navigating contemporary media, and ask and help us answer many of the most significant media-related questions that we need to grapple with. At a time when we most need it, they provide a detailed, reliable, and invaluable overview of what we are doing, what is being done to us, and what we can do to keep our inevitable immersion in media from being unintelligible and overwhelming."-Sidney Gottlieb, Professor of Communication and Media Studies, Sacred Heart University, Fairfield, Connecticut "Finally! A textbook that's up to the challenge of the digital media environment. Here's an accessible and thought-provoking set of resources and thought experiments on everything from the global brain and viral media to network effects and DDOS attacks. These are the phenomena at the very center of our almost universally disrupted society and political economy, rendered in ways that should enable the next generation to navigate their way beyond the chaos."-Douglas Rushkoff, author of Program or Be Programmed, Present Shock, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, and Generation Like